SLAVERY (ISSUE)

The Portuguese were the first Europeans to enslave Africans. They began this practice during their explorations of the West African Coast in the fifteenth century. They usually acquired their slaves from other Africans and took them back to Europe where they were employed as servants or laborers.

Christopher Columbus opened the New World to Europeans in 1492, and soon Spain, Portugal, and other European states had established colonies. Regardless of whether the Europeans concentrated on mining precious metals (as the Spanish did), grew and refined sugar cane (as was true of virtually all the European powers), or settled down to grow staple agricultural exports (as in the English case), they soon had to confront the need for labor. The Spanish and, later, the English attempted to enslave American Indians, but that did not work well (in part because the lack of immunity to European diseases decimated the native populations), so they began to import laborers from Africa.

Actually, the English colonists turned first to their own poverty-stricken population of peasants who had been driven off the land by the conversion of crop land into sheep pasture during the sixteenth century. This displacement of the English peasantry was called the enclosure movement. It produced an army of desperate and angry peasants who wandered the English countryside looking for work, poaching game on the gentry's land, or engaging in robbery, for which many were hanged. Of the peasants who remained in England a good number would eventually make up the country's wage labor force as textile manufacturing changed England from an agricultural to an industrial economy. But tens of thousands of poor Britons also immigrated to the New World as indentured servants. Tobacco farming was profitable but labor-intensive and the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia, Carolina, and Maryland employed these bonded laborers. Until the late seventeenth century, most of the work force in the English mainland colonies were indentured servants, working an average of seven years to pay off the debt of ship passage. Some of these bonded servants eventually became prosperous in the America; many died from overwork, disease, and mistreatment, or else, after their debt was paid, migrated to the back country and lived as subsistence farmers.

By the last quarter of the seventeenth century, an improving employment picture in England dried up the stream of available indentured servants. The practice of many white servants of escaping and passing themselves off as independent laborers or small farmers as well as the fact that many of the popular protests and rebellions in the New World, like Bacon's Rebellion (1675–1676) involved poor former indentured servants, also led the colonial elite to consider an alternative labor source.

That source was African slaves. A lucrative system known as Triangular Trade provided this new labor source. Traders took rum, guns, powder, and

**SLAVES AND SLAVEHOLDERS, 1860**
States	Holders with 1-9 Slaves	Holders with 10-20 Slaves	Holders with 20-50 Slaves	Holders with 50-100 Slaves	Holders with 100-500 Slaves	Holders with 500-1000 Slaves	Holders with Over 1000 Slaves	Total Slave-Holders	Total Slaves
Source: United States Census, Agriculture of the United States in 1860, p. 247.
Alabama	21,793	5,906	4,344	1,341	346			33,730	435,080
Arkansas	941	142	56	10				1,149	111,115
Delaware	562	25						587	1,798
Florida	3,368	976	603	158	47			5,152	61,745
Georgia	27,191	7,530	5,049	1,102	211	1		41,084	462,198
Kentucky	31,819	5,271	1,485	63	7			38,645	225,483
Louisiana	14,886	3,222	2,349	1,029	543	4		22,033	331,726
Maryland	11,203	1,718	747	99	16			13,783	87,189
Mississippi	19,559	5,489	4,220	1,359	315	1		30,943	436,631
Missouri	21,380	2,400	502	34	4			24,320	114,931
North Carolina	24,520	6,073	3,321	611	133			34,658	331,059
South Carolina	16,199	5,210	3,646	1,197	441	7	1	26,701	402,406
Tennessee	28,389	5,523	2,550	335	47			36,844	275,719
Texas	16,292	3,423	1,827	282	54			21,878	182,566
Virginia	37,577	8,774	4,917	746	114			52,128	490,865
Total	275,679	61,682	35,616	8,366	2,278	13	1	383,635	3,950,511

trinkets to Africa where they were exchanged for slaves. The slaves were shipped below decks to the West Indies where they were sold. Then the traders hauled cargoes of sugar, and other products to North America, where the sugar was converted to rum, or else they sailed back to Europe. The trip to the New World was hideous for the slaves. They were packed into the slave ships like sardines and many died en route. This infamous leg of the Triangular Trade was known as the Middle Passage. In this fashion the slave trade continued for 300 years and millions of people were deported from Africa in the process.

Slavery may have been introduced in the English colonies as early as 1619 when a Dutch trading vessel brought 20 Africans to the Jamestown Colony. (Historians disagree on whether this particular group of Africans was enslaved or not.) At any rate, towards the end of the century as the settlers' tobacco plantations grew larger, their need for workers also grew and they found that Africans better served their needs. Africans could not pass themselves off as free men and their total subjugation meant that their exploitation was governed by cold calculation of how hard to work them.

In the Caribbean the cost of replacing slaves who died from overwork was low enough that it made economic sense to work the slave to death. That calculus of exploitation worked the other way in the mainland colonies. Slaves were sometimes worked to death, but the price of replacing slaves was high enough that they were often allowed enough food and just enough sleep to live an abbreviated life-span and even to replace their numbers through informal families in the slave quarters.

Between 1620 and 1670, through court decisions and legislative actions, African servitude was made permanent and the institution of slavery was born. It was based not only on the need for labor but also on the ideology of white supremacy. The British colonists clearly regarded the Africans as inferior.

By 1700 there were about 27,000 African slaves in British North America, a number which represented approximately 10 percent of the population. South Carolina had the greatest number of slaves, followed by Virginia. The number of slaves was relatively small in North Carolina, the Middle Colonies, and New England. The demand for slaves intensified in the eighteenth century because of the expansion of agriculture. In Virginia, for example, the number of slaves increased from 12,000 in 1708 to 120,000 in 1756. The slave trade also continued to expand and it was estimated that more than five million slaves were imported into all areas of the New World during the eighteenth century.

As the number of slaves increased, fear of uprisings intensified. By 1700 all the colonies had laws known as Slave Codes which governed the status of the slaves. Slaves were considered property, had no rights, and could be killed for misbehavior. There was no legal limit on lashings. These laws also restricted the movement for slaves, for example, under the Virginia Code, no slave could leave the plantation without permission.

Fear of resistance was not unfounded. There was an aborted slave revolt in Virginia in 1687, and a bloody uprising in New York in 1712. There were several outbreaks of violence in South Carolina in the 1720s and 1730s, and in 1741 panic swept New York City when it was rumored that slaves and poor whites were conspiring to seize control of the city. The New York City conspiracy did not materialize but more than 150 people were arrested and many of them were executed.

Anti-slavery sentiment on the part of whites emerged in the late 1600s. The Pennsylvania Quakers issued a formal denunciation of slavery known as the "Germantown Statement" in 1687 and anti-slavery pamphlets began to appear during the eighteenth century. One of the best known of the early pamphleteers was John Woolman. And in 1775 Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), Thomas Paine (1737–1809), and James Otis (1725–1783) founded the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society.

The American Revolution (1775–1783) created a paradox with respect to slavery. The Declaration of Independence stated that "all men are created equal," but this was clearly not true in America where, in 1776, there were nearly 500,000 slaves. Moreover many Revolutionary leaders, including George Washington (1732–1799) and Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), owned slaves. Even though they were critical of the institution of slavery they believed Africans to be inferior to whites and freed very few of their slaves during the struggle. Even so there were some changes after the war. Between 1777 and 1786 all of the northern states provided for either the immediate abolition, or gradual emancipation, of slaves. Moreover the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory (the area that eventually became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin). These changes resulted from a combination of economic and humanitarian forces. Slavery was not profitable in those areas where there were no large plantations and there were those who believed deeply that the practice was immoral.

But, at the same time cotton production was expanding in the South. When Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793, cotton farming became more profitable and the demand for slaves in that region suddenly increased. At the same time, southerners began to defend slavery as a virtuous institution rather than a necessary evil. As cotton culture expanded it came to be concentrated in the Lower South—South Carolina, Western Georgia, North Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. By 1840 there were about 2.5 million slaves in the South, most of them concentrated in these states.

Cotton production continued to rise and by 1860 it represented 57 percent of all U.S. exports. This in turn led to an increased demand for slaves. Even though the importation of slaves was illegal after 1808, it is estimated that at least 300,000 were smuggled into the country between 1807 and 1860. Slaves were also bred, like cattle. A vigorous internal slave trade developed in which thousands of human beings were sold at auction.

Both the militant defense of slavery and militant opposition began to appear in the 1820s. Southerners argued that they had a constitutional right to hold property, including slaves. Southern pro-slavery advocates went on to quote Bible passages that mentioned the existence of slavery in Old Testament days. Others argued that a menial class was a requirement upon which to build civilized society—indeed, they held that slavery was the very condition of democracy in the South. And, of course, southern apologists for slavery also propounded the white supremacist doctrine that Blacks were perfectly suited to their subordinate role because they were physically strong and mentally inferior.

The anti-slavery movement evolved from the moderate pipe-dream of re-colonizing emancipated blacks in Liberia, in Africa. The American Colonization Society, founded in 1817, included prominent figures like James Madison and John Marshall. It proposed to free the slaves, compensate the owners, and return the freed slaves to Africa. But the size of the slave population even in 1830 precluded such a solution. Still, by publishing newspapers and pamphlets, the American Colonization Society at least began the process of education and advocacy of freeing the slaves.

A more radical solution was simply the immediate freeing of the slaves. This was the demand of the "abolitionist" movement that grew up around William Lloyd Garrison, of Massachusetts. Beginning in 1831, Garrison and his associates published The Liberator and broadcast the demand that slavery be ended immediately, by force if necessary, and without any compensation to the slave owners. In 1832 Garrison founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society and helped to found the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. These developments evoked fear and hatred in the South. Nonetheless, the abolitionist movement grew rapidly and was very active. It sponsored lectures on the subject. It sent the eloquent former slave, Frederick Douglass to England to spread the abolitionist message there.

Abolitionism was the culmination of a generation of reform movements: the temperance movement, the "asylum" movement for the humane treatment of the mentally ill, and the protest movement against the forcible relocation of the Cherokee Indian nation. The abolitionist movement was the biggest and most passionate of these reform movements. It was also uncompromising: at one point, Garrison publicly burned a copy of the Constitution because it had made provisions for slavery. By 1840 there were 250,000 abolitionists organized into 2,000 clubs or societies in fifteen states. Meanwhile, however, the institution of slavery continued to grow. By 1860 there were nearly four million slaves in North America.

If there was to be a resolution of the slavery issue, most people expected it to come through the political system. In the end, the political system failed to solve the problem or contain the explosive force of the slavery issue, but for a time it looked as though it might succeed. Political leaders like "the Great Compromiser," Henry Clay, approached the slavery issue optimistically as a series of questions that might be balanced off against one another. Indeed, almost since the founding of the nation, the process of bringing new states into the union had been guided by the unwritten principle of balancing the admission of free and slave states. It was this spirit of patching together a compromise that animated the architects of the Missouri Compromise in 1820, the elements of which were that Missouri was brought in as a slave state; Maine was separated off from Massachusetts and admitted as a free state; and no more slave states were to be carved out of territory north of the southern boundary of Missouri.

The issue of slavery drove politics from 1820 to the Civil War. Throughout this period the pro-slavery southerners demanded that their "property rights" (to own slaves) be protected by the government through measures such as fugitive slave laws. This recalled the words of John Locke, the most influential philosopher for the generation that made the American Revolution. Locke declared that all men, as an essential condition of being human, had the "inalienable" right—in society as in the "state of nature,"— to defend their "life, liberty, and property." In drafting the "Declaration of Independence" in 1776, Thomas Jefferson had air-brushed that phrase to read "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." But, regardless of that cosmetic change, the slavery issue forced the nation to decide which was the more important ingredient of humanity—liberty or property. It was the controversy over Missouri's application to join the union as a slave state that led the aging Thomas Jefferson to declare that the slavery question was like a "fire-bell in the night," waking the nation to the possibility of secession.

Slavery endured because it was profitable to the owners of slaves even though its presence inhibited the diversification of the Southern economy. Thus it was probably inevitable that the institution would be ended only by force. It was not until April 1865, when the Civil War ended, that slavery was declared dead. Its demise was finally promulgated in the U.S. Constitution with the ratification of the thirteenth Amendment in 1866.

SLAVERY (ISSUE)

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